Futurity电子书

Cover

Copyright

Title Page

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Spelling out Futurity

Writing Points to What Is “Open, Future, Possible”

Futurity

The Gigantic Shadows That Futurity Casts upon the Present

Metaphors, Themes, and Plots as Causes

Prospection, or the Practical Past

Limitations

Beyond Symptomatic Reading

After “the Romance of World History”

1989 and Contemporary Literature

On the “Wholesale Liquidation of Futurity”

“The Insertion of Man”

A Literary Anthropology of the Contemporary

Part One | Coming to Terms with the Future: German Literature in Search of the Past

1. Between Retrospection and Prospection

“It’s about Us and Our Future”: The 2006 Günter Grass Affair

Literature, Expansion, and Becoming

Symptomatic Reading and Moralism

Toward a Practical Past

2. Günter Grass: “Nothing Is Pure”

“Once Upon a Time” as the Immediate Present: Günter Grass, The Tin Drum

“But Even Soap Cannot Wash Pure”: Günter Grass, Dog Years

The Hereditary Guilt: Günter Grass, My Century and Crabwalk

Memory as Hide-and-Seek: Günter Grass, Peeling the Onion

3. Alexander Kluge: Literature as Orientation

“What Can I Count On? How Can I Protect Myself?”

“Worn Out”: Alexander Kluge, “The Air Raid on Halberstadt on April 8, 1945”

On the Meaning of Care in Dark Times: Alexander Kluge, “Heidegger in the Crimea”

Literature and the Capacity for Differentiating

4. Martin Walser: Imagination and the Culture of Dissensus

Resisting the Norms of Public Remembrance: Martin Walser, A Gushing Fountain

Dissensus

“A Clear Conscience Is No Conscience at All”: The Walser-Bubis Debate Reconsidered

5. The Past as Gift

A New Language for Remembrance

“No More Past!”: Hans-Ulrich Treichel, Lost and Human Flight

The Gift of Geschichte: Norbert Gstrein, The English Years

Endowing the Past with New Meanings: Bernhard Schlink, The Reader

On Giving: Katharina Hacker, A Kind of Love, and W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

The Paradoxical Achievement

Part Two | Writing the Unsaid: Hebrew Literature and the Question of Palestinian Flight and Expulsion

6. The Unsaid

Zeitschichten

The Unsaid

Loyalist Literature?

Sentinel for the House of Israel

7. The Silence of the Villages: S. Yizhar’s Early War Writing

The Great Jewish Soul: S. Yizhar, The Story of Khirbet Khizeh

The Idealist Motivation

The Trucks of Exile

A Recurrent Light of Terror on the Bare Facts of Our Existence

Falcons over New Villages: S. Yizhar, “A Story That Did Not Yet Begin”

8. “Then, Suddenly—Fire”: A. B. Yehoshua’s Facing the Forests

Exploring the Dark Matter

To Remember One’s Own Name

The Day of Judgment

The Afterlife of the Burnt Forest

9. “A Land That Devours Its Inhabitants. Its Lovers Devour Its Lovers”

A New Generation

“Something Horrible Happened There”: David Schütz, White Rose, Red Rose

On Being Awfully Strong: Yehoshua Kenaz, Infiltration

Struggling with the Nazi Beast: David Grossman, See Under: Love

To Enter the Shared Space, to Begin: David Grossman, The Yellow Wind and Sleeping on a Wire

10. The Threads of Our Story: The Unsaid in Recent Israeli Prose

A Gate or an Abyss? Amos Oz, A Tale of Love and Darkness and Scenes from Village Life

“To Remind Us of What Used to Be Here. To Amend the Wrong”: Yitzchak Laor, Ecce Homo; Daniella Carmi, To Free an Elephant; Eshkol Nevo, Homesick; and Alon Hilu, The House of Rajani

A Rickety Place of Hope: Michal Govrin, Snapshots

Part Three | Futurity and Action

11. The Past after the “End of History”

Mendacious Time

The Road Ahead

Hannah Arendt: Narrative and Action

The Specter of a Limbo World

To Start at Ground Level

12. Arresting Time: W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz

Probing the Spectacle of History

What Lies Underneath

“Things One Would Never Have Anticipated”

13. To Do Something, to Begin

The Fatal Quality Called Utopia: Ian McEwan, Black Dogs

Strong and Soft Opinions: J. M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

On the Intricacies of “Doing Good in This World”: Kazuo Ishiguro, When We Were Orphans

A Tale of Inaction: Ian McEwan, Atonement

14. The Terror of the Unforeseen

What the Science of History Hides: Philip Roth, The Plot against America

Acknowledging the Multivalence of Reality: Paul Auster, Man in the Dark, and Alexander Kluge, Door by Door with a Different Life

15. On This Road: The Improbable Future

The Dead Child, or the Looming End of Natality

The End of Mankind: Paul Auster, Oracle Night

Reclaiming the Victims of the Crushing Effect

Of What Could Not Be Put Back: Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Of the Possibility of Making Things Happen in the Future

Coda: Toward a Hermeneutic of Futurity

Notes

Index